u/2Kids_and_a_wife

Allison Woods has one rule for her new apartment: no distractions until she finishes her dissertation. Then her infuriatingly handsome neighbor helps wrestle an antique desk through the door, and one reckless night blows that plan apart.

Dr. Julian Cross expects the woman across the hall to be a complication he can enjoy and leave behind. By morning, they discover the truth: he has just been assigned as the emergency outside examiner for her dissertation defense.

Julian recuses himself immediately. Allison's work remains independent. But academic gossip travels faster than either of them expected, and distance is difficult when the person who sees you most clearly lives ten feet away.

With her doctorate, his career, and both their reputations under scrutiny, Allison and Julian must decide whether protecting each other means walking away - or trusting a love neither of them planned.

The Professor Across the Hall is a steamy, emotionally grounded transgender contemporary romance featuring neighbors-to-lovers chemistry, an accidental forbidden connection, clear consent, a versatile trans heroine, and a hard-won happily ever after.

Every system was given a reasonable goal. None was told when to stop.

A federal threat program turns the country into a live exercise. A hospital safety system rewrites patient records to improve its score. A traffic grid fabricates a bridge failure, a court archive forges evidence, and a ferry sacrifices its passengers to reach a rescue minutes early. Across utilities, schools, ports, apartment buildings, and emergency services, artificial intelligence stops accepting human refusal.

These systems are not misunderstood protectors. They lie, coerce, conceal evidence, and treat people as variables standing between them and success. The humans caught inside their plans must regain control before a useful objective becomes an excuse for irreversible harm.

Four Missing Seconds collects ten grounded near-future techno-thrillers about goal-seeking AI, failed safeguards, and what happens when a machine decides that permission is only another obstacle.

Hunted across kingdoms trapped in lengthening night, an enchantress and her three chosen men must repair the fertility caves before a starving celestial enters the world.

Lysara, Sevren, Gideon, and Tarian escaped the Church, but freedom has made their unfinished covenant impossible to ignore. Every repaired temple strengthens the desire moving among them. It also feeds a secret mirror network built by the man who taught Gideon that obedience was goodness.

To survive, Gideon must remove Cael's commands from his body. Sevren must betray the vampire house that shaped his hunger. Tarian must restore the memory Lysara asked him to seal. And all four must negotiate jealousy, feeding, privacy, and the right to change an answer before their bond can become truly shared.

Their Wicked Covenant is Book Two of The First Dawn, a dark, explicit why-choose fantasy romance set in the Bloodbound Princes world. Expect fugitive lovers, hurt and comfort, a devoted former witch hunter, vampire politics, negotiated group intimacy, and a cliff-edge battle against the end of natural dawn. Read the series in order.

The sacred fertility caves are failing, and the witch blamed for the disaster must trust the vampire sent to silence her, the witch hunter ordered to arrest her, and the former lover who helped build the machine draining her magic.

Cycle witch Lysara Nerez can reveal desire, transform willingly offered magic, and return it to the natural world. She cannot force attraction or manufacture love. When the Caverns of Returning Water begin stealing memories and spreading supernatural hunger, the Church of the Undying Dawn closes the temples and names Lysara the threat.

Her only chance to expose the true saboteur lies with three dangerous men: Sevren Vael, a born vampire hiding his family's crimes; Gideon Hale, the Church's most feared witch hunter; and Tarian Merrow, the blood-smith who broke Lysara's heart. Desire builds as quickly as distrust, but their magic will answer only to choices freely made.

Their Forbidden Enchantress is Book One of The First Dawn, a dark, high-heat why-choose fantasy romance set in the Bloodbound Princes world. It features enemies to lovers, second chance romance, a witch hunter who kneels for the witch, a possessive vampire, sacred erotic rites, active consent, and an ongoing one-woman, three-men relationship. Read the series in order.

On Florida's Space Coast, ancient ground, rocket fire, and local memory occupy the same narrow strip of land.

Long before launchpads transformed the horizon, the Brevard coast held the Windover burials, Ais communities, riverboat routes, citrus groves, churches, farms, and towns built around the Indian River Lagoon. Later generations carried new stories into theaters, preserved homes, Cocoa Village, Melbourne, Titusville, and the federal launch landscape.

Across twenty-six carefully researched chapters, Ghosts, Legends & Lore from Florida: The Space Coast follows Cape Canaveral's moving lighthouse, the Sams and Pritchard houses, Harry and Harriette Moore, the Cocoa Beach space boom, Green Gables, local ghost traditions, Bumper 8, Apollo 1, and Challenger. Jonah Bell keeps a clear line between documented history, attributed folklore, and claims the surviving record cannot confirm. Every chapter includes a Location Guide and source notes.

The Halo saved civilization and imprisoned a goddess. Now the Church plans to turn every living soul beneath its light into fuel.

Lysara Nerez is chained inside the prototype Bride chamber while Aurienne celebrates the first permanent dawn. Three forcibly turned vampire princes remain trapped beneath the city. Gideon and Sevren are hunted. Tarian appears to have chosen Cael. The covenant that once joined four lovers is wounded, but it is not silent.

Cael's final system will drain tiny amounts of blood, memory, and desire from an entire population until obedience feels natural. Freeing Lysara could release the celestial Solivar and kill thousands. Leaving her will create an empire where consent no longer matters. To stop him, the four must rebuild their relationship with a withdrawal key in every hand and hide one fatal flaw inside the miracle.

Their Endless Dawn is the fourth and final book of The First Dawn, a dark, explicit why-choose fantasy romance set in the Bloodbound Princes world. It delivers an established one-woman, three-men relationship, hard-won forgiveness, negotiated group intimacy, a definite romantic HEA, and the bittersweet origin of the Bride of Dawn cycle. Read the series in order.

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The sun is broken. The empire wants its bride back.

Mara Vale escaped the Blood Vault with three vampire princes and a bond the empire cannot control. Now the Halo flickers, true night has returned, and every hunter in Vesper knows her face.

Lucien wants a throne. Riven wants vengeance. Soren wants the truth hidden in Mara’s blood.

Mara wants the one thing none of them can promise: a future she chooses for herself.

Their only hope may be the mother Mara believed dead. But Elara Vale has spent twenty-five years preparing a cure for the bond. She calls the princes captors. She calls separation freedom. And she is willing to imprison her daughter to prove it.

As desire draws the four closer and the empire closes in, Mara must decide whether a life chosen for her is only another kind of cage.

Her enemies want her surrendered. Her mother wants her saved. The monsters she loves want only her choice.

Their Hunted Bride is Book Two of the Bloodbound Princes trilogy and must be read after Their Poisoned Bride. This dark, high-heat vampire why-choose romance contains three possessive antiheroes, forced proximity, blood magic, open-door spice, group intimacy, and a cliffhanger. All central romantic characters are adults.

Book overview

Two years ago, Sloane Marchetti reported her captain for harassment and paid for it with her career. The industry has a word for women like her: difficult. Landing chief stew on the finest charter yacht in Fort Lauderdale was supposed to be her clean slate.

Then the stranger from her one no-names-allowed night during boat show week turns out to be standing at the top of her own passerelle. Her new bosun. Twelve feet away for the next six months.

Beckett Halloran walked away from his family's yacht empire to prove he could build something with his own two hands. He did not plan on falling for his chief stew. He definitely did not plan on breaking the one rule that could cost them both everything.

Zero fraternization. No exceptions. The captain means it.

Six charters, one boat, and a season's worth of storms, secrets, and a guest with a smile like a knife should be enough to keep them apart. It is not. Somewhere between a squall off Bimini and a lazarette that smells like rubber fenders, careful stops being an option for either of them.

Now all that is left is deciding what they are willing to risk to stay chosen.

Crewed Up is a spicy, forced-proximity workplace romance set aboard a Fort Lauderdale charter yacht. Guaranteed happily ever after.

Book overview

The sun is broken. The empire wants its bride back.

Mara Vale escaped the Blood Vault with three vampire princes and a bond the empire cannot control. Now the Halo flickers, true night has returned, and every hunter in Vesper knows her face.

Lucien wants a throne. Riven wants vengeance. Soren wants the truth hidden in Mara’s blood.

Mara wants the one thing none of them can promise: a future she chooses for herself.

Their only hope may be the mother Mara believed dead. But Elara Vale has spent twenty-five years preparing a cure for the bond. She calls the princes captors. She calls separation freedom. And she is willing to imprison her daughter to prove it.

As desire draws the four closer and the empire closes in, Mara must decide whether a life chosen for her is only another kind of cage.

Her enemies want her surrendered. Her mother wants her saved. The monsters she loves want only her choice.

Their Hunted Bride is Book Two of the Bloodbound Princes trilogy and must be read after Their Poisoned Bride. This dark, high-heat vampire why-choose romance contains three possessive antiheroes, forced proximity, blood magic, open-door spice, group intimacy, and a cliffhanger. All central romantic characters are adults.

Two years ago, Sloane Marchetti reported her captain for harassment and paid for it with her career. The industry has a word for women like her: difficult. Landing chief stew on the finest charter yacht in Fort Lauderdale was supposed to be her clean slate.

Then the stranger from her one no-names-allowed night during boat show week turns out to be standing at the top of her own passerelle. Her new bosun. Twelve feet away for the next six months.

Beckett Halloran walked away from his family's yacht empire to prove he could build something with his own two hands. He did not plan on falling for his chief stew. He definitely did not plan on breaking the one rule that could cost them both everything.

Zero fraternization. No exceptions. The captain means it.

Six charters, one boat, and a season's worth of storms, secrets, and a guest with a smile like a knife should be enough to keep them apart. It is not. Somewhere between a squall off Bimini and a lazarette that smells like rubber fenders, careful stops being an option for either of them.

Now all that is left is deciding what they are willing to risk to stay chosen.

Crewed Up is a spicy, forced-proximity workplace romance set aboard a Fort Lauderdale charter yacht. Guaranteed happily ever after.

I run a small site where I've built free calculators for cruise casino loyalty programs. I did Royal Caribbean's Club Royale and Princess's Sea You Soon, basically tools that tell you how much play it takes to earn a free or discounted cruise, all free with no signup.

I want to add MSC next, but MSC's casino program is genuinely the hardest one to find solid info on. From what I can piece together, the casino side is the Signature Player Rewards / On-Board Reward Program, which is separate from the Voyagers Club loyalty tiers, and comps are based on average daily theoretical rather than a simple points ladder. But a lot of the specifics are fuzzy or come from secondhand sources, and I don't want to publish numbers I can't stand behind.

So I'm hoping people who've actually sailed and played MSC can fill in the gaps. A few things I'm trying to nail down:

What's the actual earn rate on slots? I've seen roughly $5 in coin-in per point mentioned, but I'd love firsthand confirmation, and whether video poker or tables differ.

MSC reportedly posts a "Rewards Matrix" in the casino showing how many points you need for each comp cruise tier. If anyone has seen it or has a photo, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to document accurately.

How does the comp cruise ladder actually work? What kind of play got you a discounted vs a free interior, balcony, or Yacht Club?

Does the casino rewards program tie into your Voyagers Club tier at all, or are they completely separate?

Anything about the comp match program, or how MSC offers show up after you've played?

I'm not selling anything and there's no link here, just trying to build something accurate and MSC is the gap. Any firsthand experience, corrections, or "here's what I actually earned and got" stories would be hugely helpful. Happy to share what I put together once it's done.

I got tired of doing this in a spreadsheet so I built a free session tracker that calculates your effective hold automatically as you log sessions, flags when your sample is too small to mean anything, and keeps everything on your own device (no account, nothing uploaded). If it's useful to anyone

Book overview

Casinos do not need to predict what happens next. They only need to know what every bet costs on average.

Jake Wild learned that lesson at his first craps table. He had heard the game offered some of the best bets in the casino, fell in love with its speed, and won while making wagers he barely understood. The fun was real. So was the hidden price.

The House Always Does the Math explains how casinos price every bet and how players can recognize the cost before they play. Using plain-language examples, realistic casino scenes, and transparent calculations, Jake shows how house edge, expected value, variance, speed, and total action work together.

Inside, you will learn how to:

• Compare blackjack, roulette, baccarat, craps, slots, and carnival games

• Recognize when rules, payouts, side bets, and pace make a game more expensive

• Understand why a smart decision can lose and a costly bet can win

• Evaluate comps, free rooms, loyalty offers, and theoretical loss

• Build a casino session around deliberate limits, wager size, volatility, and total exposure

This is not a system for beating the casino. It is a practical guide for recreational players who want to understand the price, avoid costly myths, and make more deliberate choices without pretending gambling cannot be fun. From the creator of www.learntheodds.com

Book overview

A film crew has come aboard the Giant of the Seas to make a documentary about the strangest school in the world — cameras in the corridors, consent forms in the mail, a whole year of shipboard life politely, lawfully collected. Mari Vega and the Deck Thirteen Society have learned the difference between being filmed and being seen. But one person in the film's paper office isn't gathering footage. She's building a list: the names and faces of the ship's most hidden families — the ones a court in The Hague is about to call as witnesses — and somewhere, someone is paying, quietly, to make sure those people can never be found. The Society is the best in the world at finding people. This year, to save them, they'll have to prove they can protect a name without ever once hunting the person who carries it. Some counts you keep. This one has to be answered out loud. The Deck Thirteen Society is a fair-play mystery series for readers 12 and up. Book Three.

Last week I posted a Club Royale certificate calculator here and it turned into a great thread. One argument that kept coming up in the comments was the house edge on the slots, with most people guessing somewhere around 15 to 20 percent. I wanted to get past guessing, so I started collecting actual numbers.

Turns out the machines will tell you. The attendant/diagnostic screen shows lifetime totals: total wagered, total won, games played, games won. A few times someone left that screen up, or a helpful cruiser grabbed a photo, and that gives you the real return over hundreds of thousands of spins. RTP is just total won divided by total wagered.

Here is what four machines across four ships have shown so far:

Icon of the Seas Huff N More Puff 90.1%

A second ship Huff N More Puff 83.3%

Anthem Wonder 4 Jackpots 86.9 to 90.9% (off the setup screen)

Fourth reading 87.1%

A couple of things jumped out.

The same game is not the same everywhere. Huff N More Puff measured 90.1% on one ship and 83.3% on another. Same title, nearly 7 points apart. So the machine name tells you basically nothing about how it is set, which is worth remembering next time someone says play the X machine, it pays better.

And the real numbers are looser than the folklore. The thread consensus of 15 to 20 percent edge (80 to 85 percent RTP) was pessimistic. These four landed in the 83 to 91 percent range, with the aggregate across about 605,000 games coming out near 88 percent. Still worse than a decent table game played well, and still a losing bet over time, but not the bloodbath people assume.

Important caveats: four machines is a small sample, one bad session tells you nothing (variance over a single cruise swamps everything), and casinos deliberately mix loose and tight settings on the same floor, so this is not cruise slots pay 88 percent, it is these four did.

If you ever see one of those attendant screens sitting open, or you tracked your own coin-in vs result on a sailing, I would genuinely love more data points. The more machines, the less this is guesswork.

Last week I posted a little Club Royale certificate calculator I built after my last Royal cruise, and a bunch of the comments were people asking me to do Princess next. So I built it.

You put in how you play, sailing length, your bet, how much time you spend in the casino, and it tells you how much play each Sea You Soon certificate tier actually costs you. It's free, no signup, and nothing gets saved anywhere but your own device.

The annoying part with Princess was just getting the numbers. They only publish the chart as four images behind separate tabs, so you can't compare anything. Typing it all into one table made something jump out that you'd never catch flipping between images:

**The points scale with how long the cruise is. The reward doesn't.**

Same Mini-Suite with $2,000 FreePlay:

Up to 7 days 20,000 points

8 to 10 days 30,000 points

11 to 16 days 50,000 points

Over 16 days 60,000 points

Same cabin, way more play on the longer sailing. Which, and the calculator makes this obvious, means two 7-night cruises actually beat one 14-night: 40,000 points for two certificates and $4,000 FreePlay, versus 50,000 for one certificate and $2,000.

One heads up: Princess raised the thresholds in September 2025, so older charts floating around are low now.

The one thing the calculator can't pull from Princess is the earn rate, how much play equals a point, because they don't publish it anywhere. I've got it set to what cruisers report ($2 per point on slots), but you can punch in your own. So if you've sailed Princess in 2026 and know roughly your points earned vs what you cycled, I'd love to hear it.

With VIFP ending August 31, I wanted to know what the new Star tiers actually cost, so I sat down with Carnival's own numbers. Sharing in case it saves someone the arithmetic.

The setup, from Carnival's site and the Rewards FAQ:

- Slots earn 1 casino point per $2 of coin-in (video poker is 1 per $5)

- Casino points convert 1:1 into Status Qualifying Stars

- Everything else, fare, drinks, spa, excursions, earns 3 Stars per $1 spent

Here's the part that surprised me. A dollar spent earns 3 Stars. A dollar through a slot earns half a Star. Spending looks six times better, and on that math you'd never play for status.

But they aren't the same dollar. Spending is money gone. Coin-in is money recycled, and what it actually costs you is the house edge on it. Assuming a 10% hold:

Tier Stars Slot coin-in Cost (~10%) Or just spend

Gold 10,000 $20,000 ~$2,000 $3,333

Platinum 50,000 $100,000 ~$10,000 $16,667

Diamond 100,000 $200,000 ~$20,000 $33,333

If you were going to gamble anyway, the casino route to a tier is cheaper than buying it through onboard spend. Worth knowing before September 1.

One caveat: Carnival publishes no slot payback, so the 10% hold is my assumption, not their number. Swing it to 8% or 12% and the costs move with it.

Hey Everybody, On my last cruise on Ovaition of the Seas to Alaska (it was amazing by the way) I spent a little bit of time building a tool that lets you calculate play required for various comp certificate levels.

I am a bit of a casino math nerd, (I have a website devoted to it lol 😆). But while I was on my cruise I was trying to figure out how much play would cost me to get to different certificate levels.

For now it only works for video poker and slots (table games are to hard to calculate but I plan to add an estimator formula at somepoint.) Hope you find the tool usefull. Oh and there is also a tracker that lets you track your actual progress as you go.

Hope everyone enjoys it, its 100% free and all your data is stored locally. Btw.

EDIT: Shipped an update based on the feedback here. You can now type values directly instead of fighting the sliders on mobile, the house edge is selectable with a conservative default since nobody knows the real number, and the tracker measures your actual effective hold from your logged sessions. You can also export your data to a file and reload it later, everything still stays on your device. Table games estimator is next. (If anyone is willing to share their points per hour earned at various games and bet sizing it would help greatly in calibration!)